


just a young gun (with a quick fuse)

by starknjarvis



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: (but I was right), But Venom and Eddie are fucking for sure, College, Established Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote, Established Relationship, No love interest for Peter, Other, Past Character Death, Slow-burn mentorship, he accidentally adopts a spider-student, professor eddie brock, written pre-endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 04:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17542964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starknjarvis/pseuds/starknjarvis
Summary: Eddie Brock, now slightly less of a disaster after years of living with the Venom symbiote, moves to New York City to take a job as an adjunct professor. There's a kid named Peter who keeps falling asleep in the back of his class who looks like he could use some coffee, or maybe someone to talk to.Spider-Man just lost one mentor. He's not looking for another one.





	just a young gun (with a quick fuse)

**Author's Note:**

> Just an excuse to write about my favorite MCU Spider-Kid and my favorite slobbering alien beast! In this 'verse, Venom is in the MCU, but has effectively avoided the Thanos and Avengers drama by just staying in San Francisco until now.
> 
> Written before the release of Endgame, but I wasn’t too off the mark!

Eddie had thought he’d missed New York City.

He’d loved San Francisco, but his adult life had been shaped in New York. After tensions grew too high on the west coast, he’d thought it was a sign to finally make it back to his first city.

Jesus, how had he forgotten how disgusting the summers were there?

He plucked at his shirt, which was sticking to the sweat on his back. It was early September in Manhattan, and the temperatures were in the nineties. It was still his first week on the job, so he was wearing a real suit instead of the jeans and t-shirts he preferred. Why had he thought this was a good idea?

 **Stop messing with your shirt,** Venom said, curled inside him. **You look like an idiot.**

“Everyone is roasting,” Eddie reminded them. They were walking through Washington Square Park toward his office, and proof of Eddie’s statement was all around them. There were several people in the large fountain at the center of the square—not just kids either, but NYU students and random New Yorkers. Half of them were shirtless. “Look, I’m normal compared to most people.”

**If only there were a lobster tank nearby…**

“Shut up,” Eddie grumbled. “That was your fault.”

If you had told Eddie three years ago when his show had been canceled and he’d just been dumped that he would get a job as an adjunct professor at NYU to teach journalism, he would have laughed. He’d been alone with no prospects. The idea of hanging up his attempts at investigative journalism for a comfy job teaching New York’s youth had been absurd, even if he hadn’t been an unemployed mess.

But, after several years of running around San Francisco revitalizing the Brock Report and eating criminal’s heads and half the world’s population disappearing and then reappearing, Eddie had been ready to settle down, and he’d always imagined settling down in Manhattan. With the success of the Brock Report, New York University had been eager for him to join their faculty. One of the top schools in the city, NYU liked the occasional big name professor to give them an edge over Columbia.

And, it turned out, Eddie wasn’t bad at teaching. He had the kind of on-the-ground insight that the kids ate up, and they all seemed excited to learn from him. His course was, of course, on investigative journalism, and he was starting off teaching them the stories of the world’s top journalists before he was going to assign them to try writing anything.

It was sad that even with the internet, most of the kids had never even heard of the field’s top names. A lot had heard of the more famous men, like Upton Sinclair, but talk about Nellie Bly and all you got was confused blinking.

Luckily, after years interviewing the most difficult people in America, Eddie was good at prodding and twisting until he got the reactions he was looking for.

 **We’re only two weeks into the semester,** Venom reminded him.

Venom hadn’t been as excited about the move to New York as Eddie had been. Though Eddie would always have Venom, the symbiote had been concerned about Eddie leaving behind the support system he’d found in Annie and Dan. In addition to being wildly successful professionals, they were both kind, compassionate people who had looked out for Eddie well before he’d deserved it.

When Venom had found him, Eddie had been a bit of a disaster. Well, he was still a bit of a disaster, but he was managing it better now. Venom had less faith in Eddie maintaining that on his own on the east coast than Eddie did.

 **I’m not worried,** Venom corrected him, as though Eddie couldn’t feel Venom’s emotions as clearly as Venom could feel his.

“Sure you’re not, love,” Eddie said dryly.

 **Someone’s crying,** Venom said suddenly.

Over the last few years, Eddie had adjusted to Venom’s ability to notice things before Eddie, despite their shared body. He looked around and spotted a kid hunched on one of the park’s wooden benches, hugging his knees with his face hidden under his hoodie.

It was the middle of the day, and no one else seemed to notice this kid crying in the middle of one of New York’s most popular parks. The crying was quiet, but even Eddie could hear it as he approached the bench. They were the restrained sobs of someone who had learned to cry nearly silently.

“Hey, kid,” Eddie said, stopping beside the bench. “You okay?”

The kid looked up. His eyes and cheeks were red, stark against his blue hoodie. He was familiar. Eddie was shit at names, especially considering how big some of his lecture classes were, but he knew all of his students’ faces. This one sat in the back of the room by the door, at the top of the lecture hall fishbowl. In the last two weeks, Eddie had seen him fall asleep during class at least once, but he’d been sheepish about it.

“Um,” the kid said. “Hi, Professor Brock.”

Eddie carefully sat on the bench next to him and slumped back, staring at the clear blue sky. The sun was perfectly blocked by one of the park’s massive oak trees, and not moving, the heat wasn’t quite as sweltering. “I told you kids to call me Eddie,” he said, not looking over.

“Right, sorry,” the kid said, deliberately not saying his name at all.

“Are you all right?” Eddie asked again.

“I, uh, I’ve been crying in public in New York since I was in fourth grade and Flash Thompson threw my book in a mud puddle, and I’ve literally never had anyone call me out on it? So, I’m not really sure what to do.”

 **This city is a hellscape** , Venom commented.

“That’s just New York,” Eddie admitted. “San Francisco isn’t much different. It’s that big city blindness. We’re all stuck in the same space, so we have to give each other room to breathe when we can.”

“Right,” the kid said, though he still sounds miserable.

“But I’m also your teacher, and I’d feel like a dick if I’d just kept walking.”

The kid laughed, body jolting that sound surprised himself. “Uh, yeah, I guess I get that instinct. But I’m fine, Professor Brock. Really.”

“It’s been a crazy year. Last few years, really. It’s understandable that it might feel overwhelming sometimes. Not that world-ending aliens are all anyone has to worry about. Not that all aliens are world-ending.” Eddie felt like he was losing the thread. “I’m just saying that if you’re crying—”

“I’m not crying,” the kid mumbled, wiping his eyes.

“—on a park bench in the middle of Manhattan, you probably have a reason. I’m a journalist. I talk to people. Thought it might help.”

“I…lost someone recently. He was…important to me.” He huffed a laugh that was too bitter for his face. “I should stop collecting father figures. Things don’t work out well for them.”

“I’m sorry, kid,” Eddie said. “Was it during the Decimation?” Though everyone who had turned to ash the year before had been brought back whole, those left behind had not fared as well. In addition to the car and plane crashes that took out hundreds of lives, there had been violent, terrified riots across the world.

The Avengers had managed to set things right, but had lost one of their own in the battle—Tony Stark, Manhattan’s hero. Eddie had left New York before he’d come out as Iron Man, and was back only months after he had died. It was probably for the best. Eddie didn’t stay updated on most of the other superpowered folk, but he was pretty sure Stark was known for being territorial. He might not have liked Venom on his streets.

“Sort of. But you know no one really calls it that outside the media, right?” the kid said. “It’s the Snapture.”

Eddie choked on a laugh. “The Snapture? That’s terrible. That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“And the Decimation does? Half isn’t 10%. Besides, aren’t journalists supposed to be up-to-date on all the slang?” the kid asked. There was spunk in his voice, though his eyes were still red.

“I can be a journalist without playing Fortday, you know.”

The kid laughed, and it sounded real this time. “Come on, Professor Brock. Don’t do this to me. You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m old,” Eddie said with a shrug.

 **Not old** , Venom said. It was a well-worn argument, and the comment seemed reflexive. Eddie could tell Venom was listening to the kid’s problems too.

“And it’s Eddie,” he continued. “So, you wanna tell me about him? The guy?”

“I mean… Not really?” the kid said. He looked cautious, like he thought Eddie might force the issue. He looked relieved when Eddie didn’t immediately argue. “I should get to the library. I’m supposed to be studying.”

“Better be for my class,” Eddie said easily.

The kid stood up, shouldering his backpack. “Um, thanks for stopping to talk to me. That was cool. I’ll see you in class.”

“Later, kid,” Eddie said, giving him a casual salute.

The kid scurried off toward Bobst Library at the south end of the square.

**Do you think he will be all right, Eddie?**

Venom may have started only caring about Eddie, but that had changed the longer they’d spent saving the world together. It had been impossible for the symbiote to share Eddie’s brain and not see why Eddie spent all his time looking to protect humanity.

“I don’t know,” Eddie muttered back. “We’ll keep an eye on him.”

 **Yes, we will,** Venom agreed.

Eddie stood up, and realized that his shirt had plastered itself to his back while he’d been sitting down. God damn New York City.

#

It wasn’t until he left that Eddie realized how much of a community he’d built in San Francisco. It wasn’t just the big ones, like Anne and Dan, but the smaller ones. Saying hello to Janice and Frank, two of the homeless people settled on his route home. Being able to ask Mrs. Chen about the shop, and getting hounded about his poor health in return. Knowing that Carl would save him the crispiest chocolate croissant at his bakery on Lombard Street if Eddie could get there by noon.

In New York, no one but his students knew his face. His neighbors darted into their apartments before he could greet them and learn their names, and Eddie had encountered a different worker at the coffee shop by NYU every time he’d gone inside. It wasn’t that New York was that much bigger than San Francisco—Eddie just hadn’t carved out his spot there yet.

He would do it. It would just take time.

“Hey,” he greeted the Pakistani man behind the counter at the bodega by his apartment. “Let me have a bacon and egg on an everything bagel.”

The man nodded. “$4.50.”

“Jesus,” Eddie muttered, and handed over a five. “I’m Eddie, by the way. I’m new in town.”

The man grunted and went to the grill behind the counter to make the bagel.

“What’s…” Eddie started to ask, but the man didn’t even flinch at the sound of his voice.

Instead, Eddie perused the candy bars stacked under the register while he waited. Those, at least, were the same everywhere. “The fuck is this?” he muttered, picking up a bar. “Hershey’s has a cookie bar now? Why is it designed like a protein bar?”

 **Buy it,** Venom suggested.

Eddie flipped it over. “It’s more of that mock-late, shit. No real cocoa in this thing. It wouldn’t have any more effect on you that corn syrup.”

**Then buy something better.**

Eddie picked up a pair of Dove bars instead—at least those he could trust would be real. “Fine, but we’re still going to look for a new bakery. I can’t just slam candy bars every day like I did when I was twenty.”

 **You can. It’s healthy, for us,** Venom said.

“Yeah, but I’m a fucking college professor now,” Eddie shot back. “I think I should have a classier diet than my kids.”

**You had Hot Pockets for dinner last night. And the night before.**

“Shut up,” Eddie hissed, just as the bodega employee came back with his bagel wrapped in thin brown paper. “Hey,” he said, used to deflecting from his conversations with Venom. “I didn’t catch your name, man.”

“I didn’t give it,” the man said shortly, and waved Eddie out of his store.

 **We could eat him,** Venom suggested.

“We can’t eat people just because they’re rude,” Eddie muttered as they walked back into the morning heat, the bell over the door clanging overhead.

 **Rude to _you_** , Venom pointed out.

“Even if they’re rude to me, love,” Eddie said.

He could feel the roiling mass of Venom’s irritation and concern inside him, and he sighed. He flexed his hand and held it open expectantly. The cool, slick feeling of Venom slid from his forearm and palm, intertwining with his fingers so that they were holding hands.

Eddie squeezed the hand, and felt it squeeze back.

He may not have any friends in New York, yet, but he wasn’t navigating it alone.

#

Eddie rolled onto his left side and paused for two seconds before reaching back and flipping his pillow over again. The rattling air conditioner in his window was blowing weakly into his small bedroom, but Eddie had run hot even before he’d been bonded with an alien symbiote, and now seemed to sweat even in fifty degree weather—much less the nineties New York City had been hovering at for the last week.

He closed his eyes deliberately, like he was shutting a door. He was teaching a goddamn nine AM class in the morning, a short stick given to the new guy. Who gets up that early on a Monday? It was better than the eight AM classes, but not by much. Eddie, if given the chance, tended to sleep until past noon.

His eyes opened again, and he stared at the ceiling. “Fuck,” he muttered, rubbing his face. He was wired, despite the late hour. It was like there was a buzz of electricity skating just under his skin, urging him up and out of bed.

For once, that buzz wasn’t coming from Venom, who sounded petulant in his mind. **You should be asleep,** they said. **You usually fall asleep after you orgasm.**

“It’s not a commentary on your fucking lovemaking skills,” Eddie grumbled, finally giving up and sitting up. “I just have a lot of stuff on my mind.”

The hint of Venom’s grin was wicked in his mind. **We could try again. Perhaps this time you won’t be able to think afterward.**

It was tempting. Of course it was. His relationship with the symbiote in his mind and body had gotten physical after a few months of unbearable sexual tension, while Venom had tried to grasp his newfound sexuality and Eddie had desperately wondered whether becoming the first human to fuck an alien would be a new high or low in his life.

“Or,” Eddie suggested, glancing out the dirty window over his AC unit, “we could go out.”

The grin was back in Venom’s mental voice. **Oh, yes, Eddie. We could do that.**

In their combined form, it was easy to slip through his living room window and climb to the rooftop of his small East Village apartment.

New York City had plenty of local vigilantes, and Eddie and Venom had agreed to keep out of crime-fighting when they’d made the move across the country. Just because Venom _could_ heal Eddie of all the broken limbs and bruises he got while they fought didn’t mean either of them liked the process, and—honestly—they were getting too damn old to go out and eat supervillains every night.

 **Maybe a criminal, though,** Venom suggested, and in their combined form, Venom’s thoughts of brains and eyeballs made Eddie hungry too.

“Maybe,” Eddie conceded. “If something falls in our lap. But we’re trying to keep a low profile. We’ll have to get rid of the bodies.”

 **Easy** , Venom said dismissively, and they leapt from their rooftop to the next.

The buildings in the East Village were far lower than they were in Midtown, but Eddie still got a flash of frantic adrenaline as they cleared alleys from six stories up. Still, their combined strength made something in Eddie’s chest unclench. They would just stretch their legs for a while and try to shake off the phantom anxiety from the big move and new job. In this form, Eddie _was_ Venom, and they felt unstoppable.

There was a bigger concentration of buildings pushed together in Manhattan than there were in the more sprawling San Francisco, and it was easy for Venom to jump their way along the city, from the broader streets of the East Village to the cramped maze of the West. Like San Francisco, the smells of the city were strong and diverse. Eddie’s senses were all sharper in this form, the world becoming a riot of color, sound, and scent around him.

 **Gross** , Venom said succinctly.

“You’re not wrong,” Eddie conceded. Why were most of New York’s smells urine and hot garbage?

They tensed and then leapt up from a third story roof to a seven story one. Their momentum slowed near the top, and they extended their claws in case they needed to grab onto the brick, but they made it over the lip of the room. Eddie whooped and pumped their fist into the air. “God, I missed this,” he said.

 **We are best together,** Venom agreed.

South of Washington Square Park, an apartment complex was under construction, covering the sidewalk in thick, crossed scaffolding. The panels and bars hid the narrow walkway from the street, but with his enhanced hearing, the conversation happening inside was still audible.

“Give me your purse. Throw it over here.”

Damn it. Using their claws, Venom slid down the side of the scaffolding and ripped apart a pair of bars so they could crawl across the ceiling in the cramped space. As the conversation had indicated, there was a man in a hoodie with a gun pointed at a woman in a sequined dress. From her makeup, she was clearly on the way back from a night out, and she was holding a small clutch in a shaking hand.

Neither of them had noticed the black shape moving along the ceiling toward them.

 **We can eat _him_** , Venom purred as they moved into position.

“We don’t know he’s _evil_. Mugging is complicated,” Eddie said quietly. “Sometimes there are socioeconomic—”

“Please, I’m pregnant,” the woman begged.

“Shut up, bitch.”

“Yeah, we can eat him,” Eddie said, and they fell heavily onto the sidewalk behind the man.

The mugger turned, gun raised, and then screamed.

The woman, with more wisdom than her trek through the narrow scaffolding at three in the morning would have suggested, turned and ran. Luckily, probably because she was pregnant, she was wearing flats, and booked it out of the confined space like a track star.

The mugger, taking advantage of the fact Venom was making sure that the woman got away, fired the gun twice. The shots echoed in the small space. Venom dodged the second bullet, but the first landed in their shoulder. Venom’s alien flesh pushed the bullet out and left it to clatter onto the sidewalk as he stalked forward.

“What _are_ you?” the mugger asked as Venom lifted him off the ground. His feet dangled over the sidewalk, and he was shaking with fear. Good. The gun was limp in his hand—he’d realized that shooting Venom was useless earlier than most in his situation did.

“ **Your doom** ,” Venom said before opening their jaws wide.

“Wow, that was _so_ dramatic,” quipped a voice nearby, and then a pair of feet slammed into Venom’s shoulder.

Venom stumbled, dropping the mugger in a heap on the sidewalk, and looked over at… Spider-Man. The small man’s red costume was as bold as blood in the bright fluorescent lights of the covered sidewalk. He was half Venom’s size, if that, but that kick had been powerful.

He heard rather than saw the mugger raise his gun toward the newcomer, and Venom lashed out with a tendril without looking to grab the gun and crush it before he could shoot. “ **Spider-Man** ,” Venom purred. “ **You interrupted my meal.** ”

“Holy crap, were you really going to _eat_ him?” Spider-Man asked. “That’s nasty.”

“ **He’s a bad man, little spider** ,” Venom said. Surely the superhero was too small to interfere if he wanted to, so Venom turned back to the mugger. “ **Hold still** ,” he suggested, and reached out to grab the man again.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Spider-Man said, and then Venom found himself stepping back to block a flurry of blows. Spider-Man moved fast, but even his clearly super-human strength wasn’t enough to truly stop Venom. Still, he was distracted dodging a blow to his head and taking a kick to his left thigh. He growled when he heard the mugger running from the tunnel.

“ **You’re letting him escape,** ” Venom snarled, punching the spider in the chest and sending him flying into the scaffolding.

Spider-Man got to his feet with a little less ease than before, wheezing. “Better that than letting you eat him!”

“ **He was mugging a pregnant woman!** ” Venom shouted back, claws extended to prepare for another attack.

“Oh, heckity heck,” Spider-Man muttered, and twisted to shoot a web at the fleeing criminal. The white string tangled around the man’s legs, and he fell on the ground. The scent of fresh blood hit the air, and Venom breathed it in like a fine wine.

Spider-Man moved to stand between Venom and the fallen mugger, holding his hands up in a defensive position. “Okay, I’ll call the cops with an anonymous tip, but you can’t eat him.”

“I can’t?” Venom was nearly amused, but his eyes were still locked on the fallen man. All trussed up and ready to devour.

“You can’t!” Spider-Man practically yelped. “I know who you are, okay? Venom, right? I wasn’t expecting to see you in New York, but I’ve seen the profiles of all the heroes around the world! And you are a hero, aren’t you? You stopped that alien who was trying to destroy California! I don’t know how they do things on the west coast, but in New York we _don’t eat_ bad guys.”

“ **You’ve never heard of a midnight snack?** ” Venom clicked his tongue, and then let it hang long. “ **You’re missing out**.”

“That’s disgusting and wrong. And cannibalism. Which is also wrong,” Spider-Man said.

“ **I’m not human** ,” Venom corrected, though that wasn’t entirely true. Eddie had been forced to get over any squickiness with eating other humans a long time ago.

“Okay, fine. Vore, then.” Venom blinked at him. “But this is Earth and you can’t eat people here,” Spider-Man said. He stood up straighter. “More importantly, this is New York, and I won’t _let_ you eat people here.”

Venom tilted their head. Now that some of the bloodlust had quieted, Eddie was really listening to Spider-Man’s voice. Jesus, how young was this one? He was definitely too young to have graduated college yet—maybe not even high school. Shouldn’t superheroes at least need a GED before fighting crime?

With Iron Man gone, Spider-Man had taken his place as the biggest superhero in the city. There was a concentrated effort by some of the media to label him as an off-brand vigilante, but Eddie had done enough reporting on SI to recognize Stark tech when he saw it. If Spider-Man hadn’t been supported by Iron Man, Eddie would eat his press badge. Had Stark known how young his little protégée was?

“ **Well, I wouldn’t want to have to fight _Spider-Man_** ,” Venom drawled, finally stepping out of their fighting stance. “ **You know, we did good work in California.** ”

“We?”

“ **We** ,” Venom said, gesturing to themselves.

“Like…Gollum?”

Eddie conjured a memory of Gollum feasting on a raw fish, and sent a mental shrug at his other. Venom did not sigh, but it was close. “ **Our point is that we could teach you. You are small and fast, but do not hit as hard as you can. We can help you**.”

“Yeah, no thanks. I don’t need to work with someone who _eats people_.”

“ **How will you be sure we do not eat people if you do not work with us?”** Venom asked.

It was impossible to see behind the mask, but the kid’s lenses squinted like he might have been frowning. “Because…you know it would make me mad?” He crossed his arms. “I don’t know what to do here, man. You’re supposed to be a superhero. Superheroes here don’t kill people.” After a beat, he added, “Do you have to eat people to survive?”

They had thought so at first, but there were other ways to get the chemicals Venom needed—other live meats, chocolate, and sex being their favorites. **“What if we say yes?”**

“I know some smart doctors,” he said earnestly.

Venom laughed, a rasping sound that made the kid flinch. “ **So do we, little spider.** ” They thought for a moment, and then agreed on a plan. “ **We do not need to eat people. We just think they’re delicious.** ”

“Don’t make yourself a bad guy,” the kid warned. “You don’t want me to fight you.”

“ **We do not** ,” Venom conceded, though not for the reason the kid thought.

“Good. Right,” Spider-Man said. “I don’t want to kick you out of the city, since you did good work on the west coast, but you have to be good.”

Like they were the kid here. “ **Good** ,” Venom repeated.

“Great. All right,” Spider-Man said, nodding to himself. “I should keep patrolling, and you should, uh, go home? Go home.” He was testing his authority, not sure if Venom would listen.

Venom waved a hand. “ **Be safe** ,” they said.

“Uh, yeah. Sure,” Spider-Man said. “You go first, though. Then I’ll call the cops on this guy.”

Venom shook their head, and then launched toward the ceiling. They dug into the metal scaffolding with their claws, and then crawled across the roof. “ **Goodnight, Spider-Man** ,” they said, before slipping out of the walkway.

“Holy crap, that was scary,” Spider-Man muttered before they got out of earshot.

On top of the scaffolding, they waited five minutes before the young webslinger emerged and swung north toward Washington Square and Midtown beyond. He moved easily between the buildings, swinging low over the cars and cabs still out this late before sending another string of web out.

“ **Should we follow him?** ” Venom asked. In this form, they tended to both use their mouth.

Eddie thought about, then shook their head. “Nah,” he said. “I think we’d freak him out. He doesn’t trust us.”

“ **But you’re worried about him**.”

“He sounded young. Too young for this business. You know the things we’ve seen doing this. I wonder what the fuck Stark was thinking.” They watched the small figure disappear up Fifth Avenue. “Then again, the kid seemed pretty determined. I bet it’s hard to keep him off the streets.”

“ **We could do it.** ”

“Probably, but I’m not sure I want to risk someone posting a YouTube video of us getting our ass beat by Spider-Man. He was stronger than he looked, and he was holding back. I don’t think he usually goes for blood, and we wouldn’t want to kill a kid. We should just keep an eye out for him. Help where we can. If we push too fast, he might really try to kick us out of the city, and we just unpacked the last box.”

To be fair, they hadn’t brought much from San Francisco, but it was the principle of the thing.

“ **I do not think he could beat us, but we do not fight well when you do not truly want to win,** ” Venom said. “ **Do you believe you are ready to sleep now? Even though we did not get our meal.** ”

“Yeah, that was enough excitement for one night. Let’s go, love.”

They jumped their way back across the city, clearing avenues in single, enormous leaps. Below, cabs weaved around each other, and late-night pedestrians stumbled along the sidewalks without looking up. Even if someone did spot them, New York City had gone through too much in the last ten years to care much about one new alien.

Overhead, the city lights collided with the haze of smog that always covered Manhattan.

#

It took some fiddling with their wifi, but the Skype call on Eddie’s shitty old computer finally connected, and Anne and Dan’s faces filled the screen. “Eddie! Venom!” Dan exclaimed, as though this weekly call had not been a regular occurrence during the two months since they had left San Francisco.

“Hi, boys,” Anne said, waving.

“Hey, guys,” Eddie said, leaning back so his face wasn’t so large in his small thumbnail. “Where’s the kiddo?”

Anne had given birth to their first kid in May. The night of the birth had been one of the most stressful—and then most beautiful—of Eddie’s life. There had been a new supervillain in town, which had resulted in a car nearly crushing Dan on their rush to meet Anne at the hospital, but they had slid into the delivery suite just in time for baby Janet’s arrival.

Anne, Dan, and Jan. Eddie still wasn’t sure if they’d realized what they’d done, and he wasn’t going to be the one to tell them if not. He’d been a shitty friend for too long. He could hold his tongue about their new daughter.

“Asleep, finally,” Anne said. “She’s been crying a lot this week. I think she misses her godfather.”

“She’s five months old,” Eddie pointed out.

“Fine, but we miss her godfather,” Dan said, smiling just to the left of the computer’s camera. “You’re a month into the school year. What’s the official verdict?”

“It’s good,” Eddie said. “Yeah, really good. The kids are mostly smart, and I’ve been making them work hard. They ask good questions, and only two or three fall asleep during class.” One was the kid Eddie had caught crying in the park, who, it turned out from a stealthy roll call check, was named Peter Parker. “Print journalism may be struggling to keep above water, but the field as a whole is looking bright if these kids are its future. They care about the truth, you know?”

“A bunch of future Brock Report stars?” Anne asked. Over the years, she had fully forgiven Eddie for his callous use of his journalistic drive to excuse his snooping into her business. Anne and Dan were two of his biggest fans. He’d seen a set of Brock Report DVDs—recorded from some kind of antique DVR set—in their study.

“What about you, though, Eddie? Have you met anyone in the city?” Dan asked.

He didn’t mean dating. Eddie had not planned to tell them about the nature of the relationship between him and Venom, but they’d figured it out on their own. His goddaughter’s parents were smart, empathetic people who not only didn’t mind, but actively supported Eddie fucking his own alien parasite. (Not in those words, but still.)

Eddie had not met anyone in the city yet. His fellow NYU professors were mostly snobs, Spider-Man was avoiding him on the streets, and his bodega guy still wouldn’t tell him his name. “Yeah, of course,” Eddie lied. “Making tons of friends. New York is great.”

Inside his head, Venom scoffed.

“Eddie…” Anne said. That was her ‘I know you’re lying, and I don’t like it’ voice. It was a familiar one.

Then, the call was interrupted by the screech of an infant off-screen.

Inside of Eddie, Venom shuddered, and their face jolted between their two forms during the disruption. It was a piercing ache in the back of Eddie’s head, and all throughout his connection with Venom.

“Oh, sorry,” Dan said, rushing away from the call.

After a few moments, the crying subsided, and Eddie heaved a relieved sigh. “She got those lungs from her mother,” he said with a laugh.

Anne scowled at him. “I never yell,” she said, her own lie.

He shook his head. “That’s what you used to yell,” he said. “She sounds like you did when I used to borrow your toothbrush.”

“It’s unhygienic.”

“We swapped worse than that every night,” Eddie said, and Dan laughed as he came back onto the screen, holding an infant with a head of dark curls close to his chest.

“Sorry about that. Jan’s gotten better at sleeping through the night, but it’s not reliable,” Dan said. “When are you going to come back out to visit us? You don’t want her to grow up not knowing her Uncle Eddie.”

“Ah, I don’t know,” Eddie hedged.

“You’re coming for Christmas, right? You get the break off. I know Thanksgiving might be too short to justify the flight, but you’ll have a long break for winter, and you know San Francisco is better than New York in December,” Anne said briskly. “You should book your flight now before they get too expensive.”

“Are you sure?” Eddie asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

 **Stop being a pussy and say yes,** Venom instructed. **They are not fucking with you.**

“Yes, Eddie,” Anne said firmly. “Obviously. You’ve spent Christmas with us the last two years. We still have your stocking.”

“All right,” Eddie said. “I’ll send you my flight info.”

“Good,” Anne said.

“Tell us about New York,” Dan said, a hand stroking absently through his daughter’s hair. “I saw a video about some sort of unicorn latte?”

Eddie laughed. “C’mon, you think I drink that sort of shit? Just because I moved to New York doesn’t mean I’m going to start waiting in two-hour lines in Soho,” he said. To appease Dan’s disappointed expression, he told them about his classes, and the mysterious party that seems to be happening in what he’d thought was an abandoned building near his apartment. He’d passed long lines idling outside the doors late at night, and Venom could hear music coming from inside.

Finally, the parents begged off the call in a whisper—it was earlier in California than in New York, but Janet finally had fallen back asleep. Eddie waved to them, Venom’s black threads covering his palm to show the gesture was from them both, and then he closed his laptop.

**Eddie, why do you do that?**

“Do what?” Eddie asked, standing up to make a mug of chamomile tea. Mrs. Chen had gotten him onto the stuff when meditation had failed, and he liked the quiet ritual before bed.

**You attempt to deny Dan and Anne’s friendship. You almost rejected their invitation to visit, though we have no plans for the holiday here. You would leave yourself alone for no reason.**

“I have a reason,” Eddie shot back, slamming the microwave door and folding his arms as his mug began to slowly spin. “I can’t be their disaster man-child anymore. It’s not fair to them.”

 **You are not a ‘man-child,’** Venom said, putting the full weight of his disgust into the word. **You’re a man. Their friend.**

“No, I’m like the disaster toddler that wandered into their very successful lives that they look after because they’re so very successful and I’m so very much a disaster,” Eddie said. His voice was more caustic than he had expected it to be.

 **You’re less of a disaster than you used to be,** Venom said.

“High praise. Look, I appreciate everything they’ve done. They’re nice folk, and they helped me through a rough time. But it’s shitty of me to make them take care of me when they have an actual kid now. They can’t worry about supervillains or whether or not I’ve gotten a haircut in the last six months. They have real things to deal with now.”

**Anne is a lawyer. Dan is a doctor.**

“Yeah, like I said—like ridiculously successful parents looking at the kid who only got into a community college.”

 **You are a respected professor at a top university,** Venom snapped, finally matching his aggressive tone. **You are not a disappointment. You are doing admirably in our life. My _point_ was that they have always had ‘real things’ to do, and they’ve always made time for you because they care about you. You are not a burden on them. They chose to be your friend. You should not reject them now because you’re suddenly self-conscious. They want their child to know you. Don’t deny them that by being a little bitch.**

“You sure know how to comfort a guy,” Eddie said.

**You—we—thrive on your connections. You need friendship, Eddie. I will always be here for you, but you have always needed a network. It’s a human trait. You’ve been making very healthy choices, and I’m proud of you. Don’t fuck it up by being an isolationist dick.**

“Fuck,” Eddie muttered, tapping his head against his kitchen cabinets. “I am being a dick, aren’t I?”

**I know part of the reason you wanted to take this job was to give Anne and Dan their space, but do not cut them out entirely. That would be the height of foolishness. They are good friends to us.**

“I know, I know,” Eddie said. “I’ll book the flight.”

 **Good boy,** Venom said, voice taking on a silky edge that made the hair on the back of Eddie’s neck rise. **Forget the tea. You’ve been an idiot, and I want to punish you. I want to take you apart, bit by bit, until you can’t remember our name, much less how to be stupid.** A slick tendril emerged from Eddie’s spine to tease the edge of his waistband. It was all for show—Venom could just as easily manifest below the belt. **But then you listened to me, and I think that deserves a reward. Dan and Anne are important to us, but we still have what’s _most_ important. _Us_. **

“God, yes,” Eddie said, abandoning his mug in the microwave and nearly tripping to get across the apartment to the bedroom.

Venom let him get to the small hallway between the kitchen and bedroom, and then slammed them against the wall. **Ah ah,** he said, tendrils pooling from Eddie’s skin to snake over his body. **The bed will be the reward. If you keep being good. For now, here.**

#

The next morning, Eddie found the cup of water in the microwave and laughed, an involuntary flush at the memory of the night’s adventures replaying vividly in his mind. At the back of his skull, Venom was smug, and a tendril wrapped around his wrist in something between a claim and a comfort.

#

“We have got to stop meeting like this,” Spider-Man quipped as Venom dropped into the alley beside him. “You said you weren’t doing the superhero thing here.”

In Eddie’s defense, he hadn’t been looking for Spider-Man—this time. Over the last month, he had gone out some restless nights to look after the younger superhero. Most nights, they never crossed paths. When Venom did find him, Spider-Man wasn’t always fighting crime. This wasn’t the New York of the eighties, or even the nineties, and the cops could handle a lot of it. Some nights, though, Venom was able to help Spider-Man out of a scrape, so he kept looking out for him.

Tonight, Eddie had let his new coworkers convince him to come out for department drinks on the West Village. Crammed into a bar the size of a closet with uncomfortably drunk coworkers, Eddie had spent most of the night at a booth in the back sipping on a beer. With Venom there, Eddie never lacked for a conversational partner, but he’d still bowed out after an hour.

He’d been heading back toward his apartment across town when he’d heard the unmistakable sounds of fighting from a narrow alley, and had hopped up to the rooftop to scope it out.

“ **We weren’t planning on it,** ” Venom said. “ **What did these guys do?** ”

Spider-Man dodged a knife and hit the man’s arm to send the weapon flying. “Bank robbing. Like, really? Like it’s the 1920s? Put ‘em up,” Spider-Man said, sending out two jets of webbing to pin his opponent’s arms above his head.

“ **Very outdated. We could eat them for you,** ” Venom offered, letting his tongue loll out to show he was joking.

Spider-Man laughed uncomfortably. “Uh, no thanks, man. We’ll just put them in jail.”

“ **If you insist,** ” Venom said, slamming a man into the alley wall and throwing him on the ground.

Spider-Man was flipping around the remaining two men, handling their frantic blows easily. Then was a quiet sound of clunk, and the smell of fresh blood hit the air. “Oh shit,” Spider-Man said weakly.

Venom turned. At first, it was difficult to spot against Spider-Man’s bright red outfit, but Venom’s nose was unbeatable. There was a gash in Spider-Man’s leg, dark and ugly.

Stunned, Spider-Man failed to block a blow by one of the robbers, and was sent stumbling into a garbage bin.

Venom was on the man in a second, launching across the alley and delivering a blow to his head. It was only the weight of Spider-Man’s eyes still on him that kept Venom from using their claws to rip said head clean off. The superhero was already hurt—if Venom acted out, Spider-Man might feel obligated to fight _him_ , and neither of them were ready for that tonight.

Venom dispatched the last man just as quickly, and then leaped to Spider-Man’s side. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Spider-Man said, waving his hand. “Oh, boy, are you really doing that?” he asked, voice going high as Venom bent to sniff the wound. “Please don’t lick my blood.”

“ **You’re healing** ,” Venom commented, standing again. This close, he towered over the other superhero.

“Yeah, I have a super quick metabolism,” Spider-Man said. “I should be all better by the morning.”

“ **Now can I eat them?** ” Venom asked, all trace of humor gone.

“It wasn’t even their fault! It was so stupid. I landed on a piece of steel by the garbage bin when I was doing one of my flips. My spidey-senses were so focused on the bad guys, I didn’t even notice it.”

“ **You’re sure?** ” Venom asked. “ **I can’t eat steel.** ”

“You can’t eat all your problems,” the kid advised, like he was giving important life advice. “Okay, I’ll web these guys up and then head home. I don’t think I should keep swinging around the city like this. Dang, it’s barely ten.” He looked down at his injured leg. “I can do a quick patch. The webbing stops bleeding.”

The kid was rambling, and still bleeding heavily. “ **No. We will take care of the city tonight.** ”

“Oh, no. No, no, no. It’s bad enough that you come ‘help’ me all the time, but I’m not setting you on this city alone!”

“ **You don’t trust us?** ”

“Look, please don’t be offended, but no, definitely not,” Spider-Man said. “I barely trust that you’re not going to eat people when I’m literally two feet away, telling you not to. If I’m not even here? Who would be sure you’re being a hero and not a villain?”

“ **We helped you tonight,** ” Venom growled. Though he denied it fervently, Venom’s pride was easily damaged. “ **If we wanted to eat people, we would not need your permission. You should _appreciate_ our help.**”

“I said not to be offended,” Spider-Man grumbled, pushing off the wall to stand up gingerly. He kept his weight off his injured leg. “I didn’t ask for your help, you know. I don’t do team-ups anymore. Especially not with _Venom_.”

“ **Big words for a tiny spider,** ” Venom said, expanding their mass to loom over him more menacingly. “ **A tiny, hurt spider**.”

“I could still take you if I had to,” Spider-Man said, voice determined but weak.

 _Careful, love,_ Eddie said mentally to his other. _We don’t want to hurt the kid. We don’t hurt kids._

**He’s big enough to fight.**

_Still._

“ **We will patrol tonight whether you stay or go home,** ” Venom said firmly. “ **You cannot stop us.** ” Without waiting for a response, they leapt into the air and grabbed onto the wall of the alley, using their claws to pull their way to the top.

As expected, Spider-Man did not follow, still standing delicately on his injured leg below. As Venom raced along the rooftop to begin their patrol, they heard Spider-Man finally shout, “Be good!” after them. They laughed to themselves and continued forward.

#

The coffee shops around Washington Square were expensive and pretentious, when they weren’t one of the dozen Starbucks in the five block radius. Still, Eddie was exhausted after helping Spider-Man the night before. After the aliens and monsters Eddie had fought, a few bank robbers and then a quick patrol of the city shouldn’t have bothered him. Maybe he was getting old, or maybe it was just that memory of the smell of Spider-Man’s very human blood.

Even if his guess about Spider-Man’s age wasn’t right, he was no alien either. Whatever powers he had may have accelerated his healing process, but he didn’t have Eddie’s automatic fix either.

Eddie shook his head and stepped forward in the long line. Spider-Man wasn’t his job to worry about. Venom covered for him last night, and would keep an eye on him, but he wasn’t in New York to be a superhero. The other vigilante could fend for himself, especially since he obviously didn’t want Venom’s help.

 **Always unappreciated,** Venom grumbled.

“I appreciate you,” Eddie said, and then shrugged innocently when the man in front of him glanced back curiously.

 **I smell someone familiar,** Venom alerted him. **The coffee in the air makes it hard to tell who.**

Eddie turned to survey the shop, tense on instinct—he had a lot of enemies, though none should have been on this coast. His shoulders relaxed when he saw a student a few people back. It was the kid he’d caught crying in Washington Square Park, the one in his journalism class. What was the name? He’d double-checked it after the first time they’d met. Peter Parker.

 **He still looks bad,** Venom commented. He was right. Peter was pale, with dark bags under his eyes.

“He’s a college kid. They all look like that,” Eddie said, though he didn’t quite believe it. There was something more wrong with Peter than freshman year jitters. At the front of the line, Eddie ordered his coffee and then asked the barista to charge Peter’s order to him too. The barista shrugged and agreed, and Eddie took his coffee and swept in to grab the only free table in the back to edit papers.

There was a wide range of writing skills in his class. Some of his students were clearly English majors, tripling what supposed to be an 800 word essay. Others could barely string a sentence together at all, and Eddie had already sent two of them to the school’s free tutors to learn what a _fragment_ was. But the heart was there for most of them, and Eddie didn’t mind the work of grading.

“Uh, thanks for the coffee, Professor.”

Eddie looked up to find Peter standing there, a large drink in hand. “Sure, kid,” he said. “You can call me Eddie, remember?”

“Right,” Peter said. “I just wanted to say that I’m okay, okay? I don’t need free coffee.”

Eddie shrugged. “I never said you needed it, but I figured you wanted it,” he said. “We’re in a coffee shop.”

“Oh, right,” the kid said, defensiveness fading. “Sorry.” He glanced around the small café, shifting the backpack on his shoulder.

Eddie had taken the last open table, and from the line at the counter, the shop was not going to clear anytime soon. “We can share the table,” Eddie offered. “I’m just grading.”

“Oh, thanks!” Peter said, sitting down without protest. “My roommate likes to listen to music—and sing along—and Bobst is so quiet I feel like I’m losing my mind. Just, like, don’t grade mine while we’re sitting three feet apart. I can’t handle the pressure.”

“Yours is already graded,” Eddie told him, uncapping his red pen again. He used the campus resources to print the homework they emailed in. It was a waste of paper, but he liked the classics. It was hard to get a sense of how an article really read if it wasn’t on real paper in front of him. Anne had always made fun of him for that—there were few things Eddie was old-fashioned about, apart from paper and his motorcycle. “Don’t worry—you aced it. You’re a strong writer, if a little heavy on tangents.”

“Wow, really?” Peter asked, leaning forward.

He seemed more enthusiastic than distressed that Eddie had brought up his grade anyway, so Eddie put down his pen again. “Really. You have a good grasp of what matters to the city right now. You could have a career in this. You’re a native, right?”

“Queens,” Peter agreed. “Born and raised.”

“You talk about the city like someone who knows it. It’s harder than you’d think—there’s a different New York for everyone, you know? I’m still relearning it,” Eddie said. “Are you thinking about going into journalism?”

Peter shrugged, running a hand through his hair. “I was actually thinking photojournalism?” He reached into his bag and pulled out a camera. It was nice, if a little battered from use. “I’m taking this class to test out my options, but I’ve always really liked photography.”

“Yeah?”

“Journalism can change the world. That’s why I was so excited when they got you as a professor. I got wait-listed for your class, but managed to get in at the last minute. There’s so much happening in the city, and no one will know until we tell them about it. I want to change New York, make it a better place. This city deserves better.”

Ah, the youths. So idealistic. Eddie had managed to change laws a few times with his reporting, but it had lost its shine after a few decades. There was still so much to do, so much to fix. Still, he gave the kid a smile. “Sounds like you’re on the right path.”

“I’ve, uh, even sold a few photos,” Peter admitted. “To the Daily Bugle.”

“Damn. That’s impressive,” Eddie said. “Breaking in can be the hardest part. You should be proud.”

Peter blushed, a grin tugging his lips up. It was the first time Eddie had seen him really smile. “Thanks, professor.”

“I’m never going to convince you not to call me that,” Eddie realized.

“Probably not,” Peter admitted.

“Can we at least go with ‘prof?’ So I don’t sound _so_ old?” Eddie asked.

“Sure, prof,” Peter said.

Peter opened his backpack and pulled out a textbook, and Eddie went back to his grading. “Oh crap,” Peter muttered, drawing Eddie’s attention. Peter stuck his finger in his mouth and shrugged. “Papercut. Sorry.”

In the back of his mind, Venom uncurled, sensing the air. **Eddie** , they said slowly. **We know that blood. And that voice.**

Oh shit.

#

Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Eddie’s eighteen-year-old student was a masked vigilante. Without Iron Man guarding the city anymore, the entire island of Manhattan had fallen on the kid’s shoulders (discounting the plain-clothes heroes prowling north of Midtown.)

Eddie had been forty damn years old when he had first met Venom. What kind of kid started fighting crime at—Eddie did some quick math— _fifteen_? What the fuck?

The kid was stronger than most adults, but he was still _a kid_. He never even _swore_. He had gotten stabbed by a piece of steel last night, even if he wasn’t still limping today. How much shit had the kid seen? It was no wonder Eddie had seen him crying alone in the middle of a park.

Eddie had considered telling the kid he knew, but how could he explain that without admitting that he was Venom, and recognized the scent of his blood? Spider-Man still didn’t trust Venom, and they had not worked very hard to change that so far.

Instead, Eddie and Venom upped the nights they spent patrolling the city, trying to help Spider-Man either in-person, or by handling crime before Spider-Man had to get involved. It was exhausting. Being a professor meant more regular hours than being an investigative journalist had, and working nights and days started to wear him thin quickly, even with Venom giving him a superhuman boost.

The next time Eddie spotted Peter falling asleep in his class, he let it slide without waking him. Hell, Eddie would have joined him if he could.

“We really have to stop meeting like this,” Spider-Man said, swinging into an alley where Eddie had just finished wrapping up some criminals in a string of cable he had snatched from a trash can. He stopped in the shadows, hands on his hips as he surveyed the scene. There was nothing left for him to do, and he seemed at a loss. “What’d they do?”

Spider-Man had a habit of asking that question whenever they crossed paths. Eddie wasn’t sure if he was just curious, or if he still suspected Venom of attacking innocent men. If they bagged someone bad enough—a murderer or rapist—would Peter loosen his ‘no eating people in Manhattan’ rule? Eddie doubted it, and Venom grumbled in his mind. They hadn’t eaten anyone since their first week in New York, and the live seafood Eddie bought from a local shop weren’t as satisfying for either of them.

“ **Drug dealers** ,” Venom said.

Peter glanced between Venom and the men. They’d been bruised in the fight, and one seemed near to losing consciousness. “You know the DA isn’t even prosecuting people for pot anymore, right? It’ll be legalized any day.”

“ **This wasn’t pot** ,” Venom snarled. “ **They’ve been selling hard stuff—heroin cut with fentanyl. We’ve been tracking them since a kid overdosed at Manhattan International. It’s a high school**.”

“Oh,” Spider-Man said. “That is bad.”

“ **Told you** ,” Venom said. “ **We are good at this. We can take care of Manhattan. You can go home.** ” It was too blunt, and they knew it as soon as they said it. They’d been ‘helping’ Spider-Man for almost three weeks now, but Spider-Man still seemed to believe he was in charge of them.

“I can’t leave. I need to patrol the city,” Spider-Man said. “Look, I appreciate the help, but this is my city. You’re just… visiting. Or whatever you’re doing. You never actually said.”

“ **We are not planning on leaving** ,” Venom said.

“Oh. Great.”

“ **You could use our help. Things have been easier this month, have they not?** ”

“You mean besides me having to add chasing you around to my usual patrols?” Spider-Man snapped.

“ **We’ve helped you and you know it** ,” Venom said. “ **We’ve cut your patrol time down, and have taken care of the city. _We_ are not the ones who need a babysitter.”**

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Peter asked, voice slightly high, though he crossed his arms as though he were casual.

“ **Kids should not be fighting crime,** ” Venom said. “ **This is dangerous, little spider.** ”

“I’m not a kid!” Peter protested.

“ **You are** ,” Venom said. “ **Iron Man should not have let you do this.** ”

Spider-Man jolted back as though Venom has attacked them, his hands dropping down into a more defensive position. “Don’t you dare bring Mr. Stark—Iron Man—into this. He didn’t _let_ me do anything. I’m a superhero. That’s who I am.”

“ **That’s StarkTech,** ” Venom said. This approach didn’t seem to be working, but Eddie had less control over his finer manipulation skills when he was in Venom’s form. They acted on instinct, dominated by Venom’s mind rather than his own.

 **I’ve seen the clip of your interview with Carlton Drake,** Venom noted internally, responding to Eddie’s thoughts. **You are no delicate hand at this, either. And we’re right about Stark.**

“Mr. Stark was a great man,” Spider-Man said, a broken snarl in his voice. “He tried to stop me, too. He tried to stop me a dozen times. He’s the only reason I came back from… You think I shouldn’t be a superhero? The world _needs_ me. Mr. Stark needed me, but I wasn’t here to help him. I wasn’t here,” the kid said, and that was when Eddie knew he’d been one of the Decimated, one of the fifty percent that vanished into ash last year. One of the ones that had returned after Iron Man had sacrificed himself to save the world. “Now he’s gone, and I’m the only one here. I’m the one who has to protect the world.”

“ **We are here** ,” Venom said, as close to gentle as their voice could get.

“I don’t want another mentor,” Spider-Man said. “Even if I did, everyone who tries _dies_. Wise, older men who try to look out for me die, and I’m still here. I don’t think a cannibal alien is going to change that.”

“ **Their deaths were not your fault**.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Spider-Man snapped.

“ **We know you** ,” Venom said, “ **and we know what it is like to lose people.** ”

“I can’t do this,” Spider-Man said, shaking his head. “I can handle this without you. Back off.” He started walking away. Almost casually, he lifted a hand and sent a web flying across the street, letting the strand lift him from the ground and carry him away.

“That went well,” Eddie said out-loud.

“ **He is stubborn,** ” Venom growled. “ **Self-destructive. In pain. Pushing himself to his frail body’s limit. Is this common with all vigilantes?** ”

“I wasn’t actually a vigilante until _after_ we bonded,” Eddie pointed out. “All that stuff came before.”

“ **Perhaps Spider-Man needs a symbiote** ,” Venom mused, and then laughed, a raspy, low sound. “ **I can feel your jealousy, Eddie. I was not suggesting I move to his body. I have my other half.** ”

“Good,” Eddie said. “The kid already has superpowers. A symbiote would just be overkill anyway.” They sighed. “This is going to be hard work. He doesn’t want to listen to us. Why should he? We’ve done nothing but antagonize him, and we’re not really role model material. Geez, I’m trying to replace _Tony Stark_. He invented being a superhero. And he had all those cool cars and gadgets.”

“ **We are better than Iron Man** ,” Venom said.

“You’re good for my ego, babe, but he was a billionaire and saved the entire world.”

“ **So did we** ,” Venom said, and Eddie realized that he wasn’t trying to boost Eddie’s ego, but his own.

Eddie laughed with their mouth. “God. There’s a reason we’re not parents.”

“ **Yet** ,” Venom said.

“What does _that_ mean?” Eddie asked.

Venom didn’t answer. Instead, they said, “ **We will manage this. The boy is not so strong to defy us both** ,” Venom said. “ **For now, we are tired. The spider will not want another confrontation tonight, and we are patient hunters when we must be.** ”

They glanced at the bound drug dealers, and Venom’s hunger was like a physical thing inside of them.

“Fuck,” Eddie sighed. “Let’s go swimming. Your body can filter out any of the toxins the bay has infected all the local wildlife with, and we can get some of the energy out. We can find some live fish without having to pay Brooklyn prices.”

Venom was already moving their body, launching from the alley and leaving the drug dealers behind them. “ **An excellent idea, Eddie.** ”

#

Eddie stood at the front of the class, one hand in his coat pocket and the other holding a clicker controlling his PowerPoint. He had given up on his tentative ‘professor’ outfit after the first month. He was never going to be a tweed guy, and lying about it didn’t benefit anyone. Instead, he was wearing jeans and a hoodie. It was the end of October, but the hoodie was barely needed with the unseasonable heat in the city.

(Thanks, global warming! Humanity could stop trying to prove Carlton Drake right any time now.)

There was a buzz of tension in the classroom, and had been since they’d filtered in. Despite the stances some of his fellow professors took, Eddie knew that some of the topics he discussed were upsetting, and he had sent an email to his students yesterday warning them that today’s topic was going to start their coverage of the importance of journalism in the #MeToo movement and its various predecessors.

Only one student seemed to have skipped class—Eddie made a mental note to send her the homework directly.

“ _The Washington Post_ , which we covered a few weeks ago in the Pentagon Papers reveal, published Graves’s story,” Eddie said. “The ten women who had accused Senator Packwood of sexual misconduct finally had an outlet to tell their stories. We’ve seen often in recent years men escaping punishment, but this particular has a happier ending. The Oregon senator resigned, and the story led to the first-ever Senate Ethics Committee investigation of sexual misconduct. There is a direct link between the publication of this story and the passage of the Congressional Accountability Act, which subjected Congress to the same discrimination laws as the rest of the nation.

“Every sex scandal that’s hit Congress in the last thirty years owes its thanks to Florence Graves, and her reporting,” Eddie said, flipping to a slide detailing the key features of the CAA.

He checked the time on the clock at the back of the lecture hall, and said, “Okay, that’s it for today. Next week we’ll move on to how journalism _failed_ Monica Lewinsky. Your next article is due next Monday, topic of your choice. Double-check Blackboard for the details.”

There was a shuffle as his students packed their materials and headed for the doors on either end of the large hall. One student moved the opposite direction, slipping past his peers and bending backward to avoid the crowd in a move no normal human could do. How often did Peter use his powers on a daily basis? Did he even notice when he did something superhuman anymore?

Did Eddie?

At this point, he had been bonded to Venom for years. Other than talking to himself all the time, which still got him stares, how often did he accidentally use Venom’s strength or senses? He hoped he wasn’t as obvious as Peter was—after their individual time in Carlton Drake’s labs, neither Eddie nor Venom wanted to be the subject of experimentation again.

“Hey, prof, you left a note that I should come talk to you after class?” Peter said, waving his latest article in the air.

“I did,” Eddie said. He checked the clock again. “Someone else has this room at the hour. Let’s take this to my office.”

Eddie’s office was more of a closet. The adjunct space rotated every semester, and the small room still smelled of its previous occupant’s love of curry. Eddie stayed open for office hours three times a week, but Peter had not taken advantage of them yet. He looked around curiously at the articles pinned up to the walls (with thumb tacks, instead of frames) and the books on Eddie’s small shelf.

“So,” Peter said, perching in the chair across from his desk, “is there something wrong with my article? You gave me a B.”

“You sound happy about that,” Eddie said. “You seem like a straight-A person.”

Peter laughed. “I used to be. I got over those unrealistic expectations in high school, prof. Not that I’m not trying my best, but As are a bit of a stretch sometimes, you know?”

Eddie, who had barely passed college, wasn’t going to argue that point. “You’ve emailed your last three assignments to me directly instead of submitting them on Blackboard,” Eddie said instead.

“Yeah?” Peter said, rubbing at the back of his neck. “When I tried to submit them there, the site was closed.”

“That’s because you were _late_ on all three,” Eddie said. “By at least a day, and in this case, three days.”

“Oh,” Peter said, shoulders hunching around his ears. He twisted the essay in his hands, crumpling the paper. “Sorry. I didn’t even notice.”

“Other things on your mind?” Eddie asked, keeping his voice light the way he did with flight risks he interviewed.

“Well, yeah,” Peter said. “You know. School.”

“This is school,” Eddie said, pointing at the article.

“I mean, all of school. I have a lot of classes.”

“Are you late in those too?”

“Yeah,” Peter said, voice quiet. “Professor Kinsley doesn’t let me email her if I miss a deadline. She just won’t grade things. My grade in Lit is…not great. Since you did grade me anyways, I thought maybe I was still on time.”

Eddie sighed, leaning back in his chair. “And you haven’t asked for extensions…why?”

Peter blinked at him, glancing around the room like he was waiting for a trap to spring. “Because I wasn’t sick? Isn’t that the only reason people give extensions?”

“You fall asleep in class all the time. You’re late on most assignments. Clearly you need the extra time,” Eddie said. “I’m not your doctor. I don’t need some diagnosis. I’m just trying to make sure you’re able to pass this class. You’re smart enough—you just need to do the work. If that takes you a few extra days, so be it.”

“Really?” Peter asked, with awe in his eyes that broke Eddie’s heart.

 **You’re a sucker,** Venom said.

“Really,” Eddie confirmed briskly, mentally shoving Venom. “Just email me next time you need a delay and we’ll work something out. I’m not a monster.” Unlike Professor Kinsley apparently was. Eddie had never met the woman, but he wasn’t impressed by her policy. Professors who refused late work without considering any excuse cared more about their egos than their students.

“Thank you, sir! Prof!”

“This will only work until the end of the semester. Maybe you need to reassess your approach for the spring,” Eddie said. “You’re smart—it’s just your outside life that’s interfering. Is there any way to make that less stressful? Any jobs you can delegate?”

**And you said I wasn’t subtle.**

Peter shook his head. “I have…responsibilities. I can’t just hand them over to someone else because things get hard. I can do it on my own. I have to.”

“Are you sure these responsibilities are on your head alone?” Eddie pushed, leaning forward and putting his elbows on his desk. “You don’t have _anyone_ you can turn to for help? No one has offered to help?”

Peter shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Look, prof, I, uh, learned pretty young that you can’t just lean on people too hard. They don’t stay, and then you’re left off-balance. You need to learn how to stand on your own.”

That didn’t sound like the ‘friendly neighborhood Spider-Man’ Eddie had seen reports about. Even though Peter had said similar things to Venom, it seemed to clash with his open expression and earnestness. Eddie had withdrawn after Anne had left him, and, despite his own complete _lack_ of earnestness, it had gone against his core instincts. Eddie had always wanted connection, whether it was from Anne or Venom or the owner of the local bodega. He was sure he wasn’t reading Peter wrong—he was the same as Eddie, but was pushing that side of himself down under his... what? Grief? Fear?

“You think so?” Eddie prompted.

“Look, my parents died when I was a kid. Then I was raised by my aunt and uncle, and then my _uncle_ died. Then I got this cool new mentor, and…” Peter stopped, as though the words had choked him. “Well, just trust me on this. There’s a pattern.”

Eddie nodded. “And you think you’re, what, cursed for that to keep happening? You can’t ever trust anyone again?”

“I don’t know!” Peter exclaimed, voice loud and unsteady. “I don’t know why it keeps happening. Maybe I’m just unlucky. Or maybe I could have saved them, and I didn’t. They died. I know how that feels. A lot of us do now. But they didn’t come back.”

If anyone had thought that half the world experiencing death and then coming back would decrease humanity’s fear of dying, they would have been wrong. Religious people who had not experienced their promised heaven said that the Decimation could not have been a true death, since it had been temporary and empty. Atheists argued that the death had been real, and the completely lost time nearly everyone experienced was just the way death was.

It was a vicious debate—so, nothing had truly changed since before the Decimation apart from perhaps _more_ fear.

And Peter, already terrified of the loss of control and being unable to protect people, had been Decimated—or Snapped. Snaptured? He still needed to Google that phrase.

**You always say that Googling slang makes you feel old.**

“It does,” Eddie muttered. “But not as old as not getting things at all.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said, waving a hand. Peter frowned at him, so he pressed on. “So, you see their deaths as your fault. You think that if you push yourself hard enough, you can stop it from happening again—even if pushing yourself puts you in danger.”

“I… That’s not…”

“You don’t trust anyone to help you because you don’t trust them to survive, but you’re falling to pieces, Peter.”

“What is this, an interview?” Peter asked, crossing his arms.

“I’m just trying to help.”

“No. No. This is what you did to Carlton Drake in that video,” Peter said. “I’m not a _murderer_ , Professor Brock. Why are you acting like I’m some jerk you’re trying to take down? Is this an interrogation?”

“I’m worried about you,” Eddie said, holding up his hands in a universal surrender gesture. Peter was still watching him like he was afraid of what Eddie would say next.

“Don’t. Look, I need to go to my next class,” Peter said, standing up with superhuman speed and grace.

“Peter—”

“I can’t. Just… Leave me alone,” Peter said, and left the office.

The door hung ajar behind him. The noises from the rest of the department filtered in through it. The rest of his colleagues were going on with their lives, having normal days.

Eddie sighed and put his head in his hands.

 **You fucked that up,** Venom commented.

“Yeah, no shit,” Eddie sighed.

#

Eddie stared at his laptop. He had moved from his office back to his apartment, but he was still at a standstill. The fifth version of his email apology to Peter was sitting in his drafts. The first few attempts had been explanations more than apologies. Eddie was _right_ , goddamn it. Peter was working himself to the bone, and not every professor was going to be an understanding fellow superhero.

 **Sometimes you forget to be a human first and a reporter second,** Venom said.

“Like you’d know anything about being human,” Eddie snapped.

Venom just hummed, a strange sensation at the back of his skull. **This is how you lost Anne the first time.**

“I remember,” Eddie said. “You agreed with me. Peter is doing too much. He needs help. How are we supposed to get him to agree to let us help, unless we make him realize he _needs_ help?”

 **This is why Anne calls you overbearing** , Venom said. **You were trying to grow out of this.**

“Fuck. I was, wasn’t I?” Eddie ran his hands through his hair. “I messed this up. I just wanted to figure out what he was thinking, and now he’s never going to trust me. He’s already barely hanging on by a thread, and I just blew on him. Left him spinning for my own entertainment.”

 **He’s not really a spider,** Venom said.

“I know you understand metaphors,” Eddie said. “He’s just a kid, and I was treating him like a source. A source I didn’t care about rattling to get what I wanted. Who thought I should be a teacher?” He huffed a sigh. “You keep threatening to eat people, and I basically asked him to his face if his dead parental figures gave him latent suicidal tendencies. Why the fuck are we even trying this? He’d probably be better off if we left him alone.”

**You want to be his mentor.**

“Well, yeah.”

**Is it for him, or for you?**

Eddie frowned, knowing Venom would feel his frustration instead of seeing the expression. “I’m already a professor, and I’m completely out of my depth. I’ve never had the big dream to shape kids’ lives. But being a superhero is a dangerous business, and he’s just a teenager trying to graduate college. He can’t even legally drink if things go to shit. I can’t keep on pretending to be retired from crime-fighting when I know there’s a kid out there risking his life alone.” Eddie stared at his blank bedroom wall. “I know I’ve been handling this all wrong, but I’m really trying to help him. No matter what’s happened to him, he doesn’t deserve to be out there doing this on his own. I had you, and it was hard enough. No one should be on their own with this sort of thing.”

**And that is why we’re trying this, even though we are not the best.**

Eddie sat up, tilting his head. “Did you just trick me into convincing myself I’m doing the right thing?”

**I’m in your head, Eddie. It’s child’s play.**

“You think I’m so predictable,” Eddie scoffed.

**You are. To me.**

“Don’t act like that’s cute,” Eddie said. With a sigh, he said, “When did you get good at this?”

 **Any humanity I have is because of you,** Venom said. **I just help you.**

“I don’t keep you around to be my therapist,” Eddie said, a wave of affection for his other flooding his system. From Venom’s contented sigh, the chemical rush filled them as well. “You really think we’re doing the right thing here?”

 **I do,** Venom said. **If it helps, I can remind you that you truly did fuck this one up.**

“Yeah, no, I got that,” Eddie said. “But we can still fix it.”

He erased his half-hearted apology and typed out a new one, short and to the point. The kid needed to know Eddie wouldn’t harass him if he came back to class. If he was worried about Peter’s grades, accidentally pushing him into dropping the journalism class he’d been so excited about would be a shitty way of doing things. Eddie wanted Peter to trust him, and that wasn’t something he could force. He just had to be there for the kid, not push him because Eddie assumed he knew better.

He didn’t want to control Spider-Man. Even if there was a chance in hell he’d be able to, Eddie wasn’t the team-leader type. He just wanted Spider-Man to know that someone had his back, someone he could reach out to if he got in over his head.

To become that person, Eddie needed to back off, and let Peter see that Venom was worth trusting by their actions, not just their words.

The computer chimed as he sent the email. Would Peter even read it?

It didn’t matter. Eddie had to try.

#

If Peter did read the email, he didn’t respond. The class Eddie had asked Peter to stay after had been on a Thursday, so he would not be in the same room with him again until Tuesday. It was now Saturday morning, and Eddie still hadn’t gotten a response from the kid.

Without class to get him out of bed, Eddie had slept in, and was waiting for his bagel at his bodega, a solid four hours after he normally came in for it. The bodega was quiet in the late morning, waking slowly with the rest of Manhattan.

Eddie rubbed at his eyes. Though the apology had been sent and there was nothing else he could do without violating the distance rules he’d set for himself, Eddie felt like shit for not doing more.

 **Doing less is doing more,** Venom said.

“Is that your alien wisdom?” Eddie grumbled, without any real heat. Venom had been the voice of reason on Thursday night, and Eddie was lucky to have them. When had his symbiote gotten a better grasp on human interaction than Eddie had?

The man behind the counter cleared his throat, and Eddie looked up. The man thrust his bagel at him, along with a cardboard cup. Eddie sniffed it, but he didn’t need Venom’s senses to identify it—coffee. Black, strong coffee.

“I didn’t order this,” he told the man. He had already paid, and was too tired for this.

“On the house,” the man said. “You look like you could use it. You look like shit.”

Warmth bloomed in his chest, as much for the brusque insult as the coffee. It was almost like being back in Mrs. Chen’s store. “Thanks, man,” he said, smiling.

“Hamid,” the man said.

Eddie blinked, and his smile grew. “Thanks, Hamid. I’m Eddie.”

“I know. Get going. I have other customers.”

It was blatant lie, and they both knew it. There was no line behind Eddie, and the store was nearly deserted. Eddie just lifted the coffee in a half-salute.

#

That night, eager to stretch his legs and shake off some of his guilt, Eddie took Venom’s form and prowled the city. It was getting closer to winter, and the heat from Thursday had been overshadowed by a cold snap that weekend. Their breath fogged in front of them, amplified by how much hotter Venom’s form ran than the average human.

New York’s residents seemed quieter than usual in the cold, tucked away until their bodies could readjust to the long winter that loomed on the horizon.

Changing his usual course, Venom didn’t search for Spider-Man. Instead, he patrolled on his own, using his shadowing presence to scare two potential muggers out of their plans.

He needed to give Spider-Man space. He wanted to help Peter, not control him, and that meant giving him space to work.

Still, that didn’t mean Eddie was prepared to let Peter handle the entire island by himself. Venom would help where they could, and start lightening Spider-Man’s load.

“ **We could never have retired** ,” Venom commented. “ **We love this too much.** ”

“It might be the death of us,” Eddie warned.

“ **No** ,” Venom said, voice booming across the rooftop they were loping along. “ **I will not let that happen.** ”

“I’ve got to die someday,” Eddie said, gentle.

Venom skidded to a stop, claws scratching against the concrete roof. “ ** _No_** ,” Venom repeated. “ **That is—** ”

“The way things go, my love,” Eddie said.

“ **No, I smell something. Blood.** ” They paused. “ **Peter Parker.** ”

“Oh shit,” Eddie said.

Venom followed their senses to the edge of the roof and looked down. Now that they were not talking, they could hear the sound of something hard hitting something soft—something made of flesh. There were soft pained noises, swallowed as though the victim did not want to be making them.

Rage bloomed inside of them, overwhelming and heady. Venom’s form flickered, swelling up even larger, and then they leapt into the alley.

Though Venom could heal them even if they plummeted straight to the alley floor from ten stories up, they instead leapt between fire escapes and raked their claws down the wall to control their descent.

Spider-Man was on the ground in the alley, curled in a ball as blows rained down from a large man in a mechanical oversuit. From the unsubtle stinger arching over his back, this was Scorpion, one of the various low-level supervillains that roamed New York.

Well, previously low-level. If he had gotten the drop on Spider-Man, his status had just increased.

It would be a short-lived victory.

Venom landed heavily in the alley behind Scorpion. Their arrival was loud, immediately drawing Scorpion’s attention from the boy he was beating. Good. Venom never wasted time on subtlety.

Without giving Scorpion time to react, Venom picked him up and slammed him against the alley wall. With the metal shell, he was heavy, but Venom was strong enough. They lifted him by the throat with one hand, and then raked him across the chest with the other. Alien claws ripped through the metal and into flesh.

The stinger lashed down, striking Venom’s shoulder. Poison pumped into Venom’s body, and they threw him to the other side of the alley. The man hit hard, and crumpled to the ground.

Venom stalked to him, and lifted him again. He tried to punch them, but Venom caught his hand and bent it away.

Already salivating, Venom glanced back at the red and blue figure on the floor. “ **Let us eat this one** ,” Venom requested.

“Don’t,” Spider-Man choked.

Venom made a disgusted sound, and then slammed Scorpion into a nearby dumpster. The lid clanged shut with the impact, and the rank scent hid the man’s fear. He was lucky. The tainted blood in his veins was calling to Venom.

Venom crouched at Peter’s side. He looked even worse than Venom had expected. There were rips all over the costume, including a deep one on his side that had stained the alley floor and the red suit with dark blood. The covered skin was almost certainly bruised, though Venom had no way of checking if the kid was bleeding internally.

Without a symbiote to heal the broken flesh, Spider-Man would need help.

“ **You need a hospital** ,” Venom said. “ **We will take you**.”

“No! No hospitals,” Peter said. “They’ll take…off my mask.” His sentence was interrupted by a wet-sounding cough.

“ **You are hurt,** ” Venom told him.

“I heal quick. Just need…a quiet place.”

The mask was looking over Venom’s shoulder. They turned, expecting to see Scorpion rising from the dumpster, but instead they caught the sliver of Stark Tower visible through the alley’s opening. The bright light and silhouette had become as famous as the Empire State or Chrysler Building, though its lights seemed bleaker after the death of Tony Stark. “ **There?** ” Venom asked.

“No,” Peter said. “I don’t want them to know. I’m fi—” He broke off, clutching his chest.

“ **Liar** ,” Venom said, carefully lifting Spider-Man into his arms. He seemed to weigh nothing.

“No hospitals,” Peter insisted, though his voice was weak.

“ **No hospitals** ,” Venom agreed. “ **We have somewhere safe**.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “Gonna…pass out now.”

“ **We have you** ,” Venom told him. The boy went limp.

Slowly, Venom turned to look at the dumpster which held Scorpion’s unconscious form. If anyone in this city deserved for their heads to become Venom’s next meal, it was the monster that had nearly beaten Spider-Man to death.

But Peter wasn’t safe yet, and Venom could not waste time on trash.

#

Venom was essentially useless when it came to putting humans back together instead of tearing them apart. Though he could stitch Eddie up from the inside, he didn’t _understand_ the anatomy, and they had had little experience together with first aid supplies.

Eddie was a bit better. His time in the field as a journalist had put him into some sticky situations that had put himself and others in danger. He’d once patched up a bullet wound in an emergency shelter in Kuwait. Then he’s had to do a quick patch on a knife wound in his own leg after getting between two brawlers in San Francisco, and not being able to get to the hospital until the police stopped looking for them all.

Paranoid after everything he’d seen, Eddie had stocked his apartment with a general first aid kit, and he carefully peered at a YouTube video while patching Peter’s cuts and bruises. Eddie had been sure the one in his side, a ragged slice just below a faded crescent scar on Peter’s chest, needed stitches, but when it had become clear that Peter’s body really was healing faster than a normal human’s could, he’d just pulled it closed with butterfly bandages and hoped for the best.

Peter stayed unconscious throughout the night, which Eddie and Venom both suspected was his body’s attempt to finish healing. Eddie swore that if the kid wasn’t awake by noon, they’d take him to a hospital whether he wanted to or not.

Luckily, however, Peter woke around eleven in the morning.

Half-dozing in their Venom form so that they could ignore Eddie’s body’s need for real sleep, they jumped to their feet when Peter jolted upright, flailing. Peter looked around quickly, eyes finding Venom immediately and then skittering to the rest of the room.

Then, his hands went to his chest, which was dressed in one of Eddie’s clean sweatshirts. His mask was still in place, but the rest of the suit underneath had been too bloody and torn to put back on after Eddie had patched him up.

“Where are we?” he asked. “This isn’t a hospital.”

“ **You told us not to bring you to a hospital** ,” Venom reminded him. “ **You were very hurt. You’ve been unconscious for nine hours**.”

“What is this place then?” Peter asked, looking around. Peter was in Eddie’s bed—he didn’t have a guest room in his tiny place—and the rest of the room was pretty standard. He’d closed his dresser drawers and closet and swept the contents of his desk away, but the mismatched furniture and heavy layer of white paint gave it away as an apartment.

Still, Peter clearly wasn’t making the connection, so Venom said, “ **Our apartment. We could not let you bleed out, and you would have without care. You requested no hospitals,** ” Venom insisted, sharing Eddie’s need to reassure the injured kid. “ **You are safe with us.** ”

“I know, I just. Wasn’t expecting this. You just…live in an apartment?” Peter asked. “I thought you…”

“ **What?** ”

“I don’t know! Lived in a sewer or something? It’s hard to imagine Venom paying bills, you know? Unless this is somewhere abandoned?”

“ **It’s a real apartment building. Avenue A and 3 rd**,” Venom said. “ ** _You_ don’t live in a sewer. Or a water spout.” **They were a little offended. Who did they think they were, the _Lizard_?

“No, no, I just…” Peter said, scrambling out of bed while still talking, moving toward the door like Venom wouldn’t notice. The full effect of his mask over a set of matching sweats was strange, like he had morphed from a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to a drunk mascot in Times Square. “What’s talking to your landlord like? Did your realtor make you pay his fee?”

“ **Where are you going?** ” Venom asked, stepping forward. The damn idiot was going to pass out again. He had only just woken up, and some of the bigger wounds were still closing.

“Thanks for the help, but I can’t stay,” Peter said. “Did you—you didn’t look under the mask, did you?”

“ **No** ,” Venom said, after a beat.

“You’re lying! You’re a terrible liar! Why would you do that?”

“ **Calm down** ,” Venom purred. “ **We have not harmed you yet, have we?** ”

“Well, no,” Peter said, hesitating. “Look, I told you I didn’t want help.”

“ **You wanted us to let you die? You believe it safe to heal in that alley? Or should we have let Scorpion beat you to death in the first place?** ”

“Of course not,” Peter said. He put a hand to his head. “I am so tired. I’m kind of freaking out.” He sighed. “Thank you for looking out for me. You didn’t have to bring me back to your apartment. Geez, you let a stranger sleep in your place and patched them up, only for them to yell at you. Sorry about that. I appreciate the help.”

“ **You are welcome,** ” Venom said, nodding.

“And it’s not like you have any context for my face if you did see it! I don’t have my ID with me, and I’m not Tony. You wouldn’t recognize my face from TV, or whatever. I know you did what you had to do. You have no idea who I am.”

“ **…Correct.** ”

Peter’s head turned to them sharply, like he could smell the dishonesty on them. Maybe he could. Venom didn’t know how far the kid’s powers extended. Or maybe Venom was just a bad liar. “You’re lying again. You know who I am. How is that even possible? I’ve been trying so much harder lately to keep it a secret.” He paced back and forth, nearly vibrating with energy. “In high school, I was just like ‘let me change while clinging to the side of the school bus’ and ‘let me save my classmates while on a field trip to a city Spider-Man has never been to!’ but I’ve been _careful_. I already lost Tony. I can’t lose Aun—anyone else.”

“ **We will not tell anyone what we know,** ” Venom said.

“You don’t understand. You don’t have an identity to protect,” Peter said, still pacing.

“ **We do** ,” Venom said.

“You…?” Peter turned to them. “You do?”

Venom and Eddie communicated internally for a moment, and then the symbiote receded back into Eddie’s body. “Hey, Peter.”

Peter tore off his own mask, as though seeing without the lenses would change the image. “Professor Brock?” he exclaimed. “ _You’re_ Venom?”

“I am,” Eddie said.

Peter gestured wildly, unable to form words. He pointed at Eddie, and then held his hand over his head to mimic Venom’s extra height, and then gaped more. “How is that possible? Is this a Hulk situation? Of all of my professors who might be dabbling with weird mutation science, I would have guessed Doctor Octavius. Maybe even Doctor Connors. You’re in the humanities!”

“It wasn’t an experiment. Venom is an alien. We’re bonded,” Eddie said, lifting a hand. Knowing what Eddie wanted—their minds were one, after all—Venom manifested in a swirling mass of tendrils around Eddie’s skin, weaving in and out.

“And you’ve been my professor this whole time,” Peter said. “How long have you known? About who I am?”

Eddie rubbed the back of his neck. “October?”

“October! That’s been months! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You seemed to want to keep it a secret,” Eddie said.

Peter ran a hand through his hair, which was already mussed from the fight and then sleep. “You knew when you were asking me about my parents last week. You were trying to manipulate me because you knew that I was also Spider-Man.” He said the last word in a hiss, as though they could have been overheard.

“I was trying to look out for you,” Eddie said. “I apologized.”

“I was going to accept it! I thought you just stumbled onto a sore spot and didn’t realize! But you _knew_. We’d already talked about it when I was Spider-Man! Were you ever going to tell me who you were?” His eyes grew wide. “Oh my God, my journalism professor _eats people_.”

“Only sometimes,” Eddie said. “We haven’t been since you asked us not to.”

“You shouldn’t need someone to ask you not to be a cannibal!” Peter exclaimed. “Am I your Will Graham? Except without the sexual subtext?”

“Actually, I think _I’m_ the Will Graham,” Eddie realized. _With_ the sexual subtext. “But Venom isn’t like Hannibal Lector. They’ve not evil, not malicious. We’re a hero, and you know it. They just have different needs than humans. Raw meat—living meat—is one of the few things on this planet that can sustain him, though we’re trying other options. I’m eating for two ‘stomachs,’ not just mine. Venom processes flesh differently than you and I do… This isn’t helping.”

Peter looked slightly green. “It really isn’t.” He stepped back, glancing at the door behind him.

“You can’t leave,” Eddie said, stepping forward. “You’re still hurt.”

“I can take care of myself,” Peter snapped, and then he bolted for the bedroom window instead, vaulting over the mattress and spiraling out the open window. It was a smooth move that would have seemed smoother if Peter hadn’t glanced off the sill with an audible thunk.

Damn it. Peter had kept them so focused on the door as an escape route that he’d caught them off guard.

“Peter!” Eddie called after him, but the kid was gone, using his webs to swoop up Third Avenue. His motions were unsteady, clearly compensating for the pull of pain in his side, and as Eddie watched, he shot onto a nearby rooftop and did not come down again. “Fuck.”

 **You thought it might go better than that?** Venom asked, sardonic.

“I’d hoped he’d wait around long enough not to injure himself worse,” Eddie grumbled. “He’s going to hurt himself.”

 **He does not want our help,** Venom said.

“I know.”

**He would prefer to suffer alone than allow us to aid him.**

“I know.”

They stared out of the window, the mid-morning light casting a golden glow over the street.

**We’re going after him, aren’t we?**

“Of course.”

#

Venom found Peter halfway to one of the freshman dormitories, huddled on a rooftop and clutching his side. The boy looked small, and didn’t bother straightening when he finally noticed Venom. (It took him longer than it should have, with Peter’s senses.)

“Uh,” Peter croaked. “That might have been a mistake.”

“ **Yes** ,” Venom growled, but they kept their distance. No matter the tension that continued to strike flames between them, they did not want to threaten the kid.

Peter, however, seemed unafraid of the looming alien nearby. He tucked his head against his knees. “Are these your sweatpants?” he asked, off-hand.

“ **Yes?** ”

“They’re comfy,” Peter muttered.

“ **Can you stand? Did the wound in your side open again?** ” Venom’s tongue flicked into the air. Peter still faintly smelled of blood, but Eddie had not been able to wash it all away during the night.

Peter tilted his head to look at them. “Are you _smelling_ me?”

Eddie recalled Venom’s form inside of his body, hoping there were no drones flying overhead. The rooftop was one of the taller ones in the neighborhood, so it was unlikely that anyone was looking down on them. “Are you okay?” Eddie asked instead of answering.

“I’m not scared of Venom,” Peter told him. “It’s—I mean, it’s a little weird, but cool. You guys have been helping me lately. And I know you did good things in California. I just…”

Eddie waited, but Peter didn’t continue. “Venom is a ‘them,’ not an ‘it,’” Eddie told him. “Gender isn’t really an issue with his race, but at the end of my hour-long lecture about the history of pronouns, that’s the one they picked.”

“Huh,” Peter mused. “Okay. Sorry. I’m still not scared.”

 **He’s telling the truth. He doesn’t smell of fear. He never has, with us,** Venom said. It was true. No matter how irritated Peter had been with them, he had not been _afraid_ of them since the first night when he’d stopped them from nearly eating the mugger. **We should take my form again.**

“Give me a second,” Eddie muttered, and then asked, “Do you want help?” It was pretty obvious that Peter _needed_ help, but Eddie wasn’t going to fight him all the way back to his dorm.

 **You think he will trust a human face more,** Venom realized, sounding snippy.

“Probably. No offense, love,” Eddie said.

“My ribs probably need another hour or two before I’m up for swinging,” Peter admitted. “I could use a hand up.”

Eddie lifted him with ease, Venom’s strength fueling his muscles. Peter leaned against him, letting Eddie take his weight. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Eddie said. “Need me to hail you a cab? If you take off the mask, you’ll look like every other freshman on a Sunday morning in Manhattan.”

“No one uses cabs anymore. Do you not have Uber on your phone?”

“Uber is the exact kind of corrupt tech giant I spent my journalistic career fighting,” Eddie pointed out. “Taxis are the New York City experience.”

“They also usually smell terrible,” Peter said. “I have a sensitive nose. But no, no cab. My roommate is already kind of suspicious of me.”

“Then where do you want to go?”

“Could we go back to your apartment?” Peter asked.

“Sure, kid,” Eddie said. Venom’s form overtook him as they approached the edge of the roof. Peter hadn’t gotten far, but in daylight, it would be obvious if a forty-year-old man hauled a scrawny teenager in a Spider-Man mask five blocks.

“Oh, that was a weird sensation,” Peter said. Eddie’s arm, which had been around Peter’s back, had doubled in size. “How far can your body expand? I’ve seen you use the tendrils to fight. Does it reduce your mass when you…” His breath caught with pain, but he pressed on, “…when you spread out?”

Venom glanced down at the kid. He seemed genuinely curious, rather than disgusted.

“Most of the aliens I’ve talked to have been more humanoid,” Peter said. “Antennae, maybe, or different limbs, but they were more familiar.”

“ **Focus on breathing, and we will tell you of ourselves,** ” Venom said, pulling him to the edge of the rooftop.

New Yorkers, despite years of alien invasions, superheroes that flew or swung over the city, and the constant glow of billboards, rarely looked up. Some were focused on their phones, others on not being trampled by pedestrian or car traffic. Either way, Venom was able to shuffle Spider-Man back to their apartment without drawing any unwanted attention.

Venom was still mostly an unknown in the city. He stayed in the shadows, and the criminals who saw him rarely sent in reports to the local news. They wanted to keep it that way.

Back in the apartment, Eddie set Peter up on the couch he’d bought from Goodwill, which he had then paid to have steam-cleaned in deference to Venom’s acute sense of smell. After his traumatic first day with his symbiote, Eddie kept a sturdy stock of quick meals in his apartment at all times, so he was able to whip up a mound of Easy Mac in a two-quart Pyrex bowl for Peter in just a few minutes.

Not the best breakfast, but from the way Peter wolfed it down, a necessary one.

“So, your roommate is already suspicious?” Eddie asked when Peter started slowing down. “Please tell me you’re not hiding your mask in your dorm room.”

“I have it webbed under my bed,” he said, shrugging. “My best friend from high school ended up going to Harvard—crazy, right? He and I had always planned on rooming together forever, but I couldn’t make him stay in the city like I had to. I told him to go—we can always be roommates when he moves back. So my dorm roommate doesn’t know who I am.”

“Why couldn’t you leave the city?”

“Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man can’t move away from New York!” Peter exclaimed, and then winced when the enthusiasm jarred his side. “I had a scholarship at MIT,” he added quietly, leaning back on the couch arm and staring up at the ceiling. “Mr. Stark got it for me.”

Eddie hummed, giving him the space to talk.

“I thought about going, back when he would have been around to look out for the city when I was gone. But when everything happened… I didn’t want to leave. My aunt’s still in Queens. I couldn’t just go.”

“Do you like NYU?”

“I do! I do. I just thought I was getting a team together in New York, and then it was just…gone? Mr. Stark died to save the world. Ned went to Harvard. MJ went to _Stanford_. I just thought New York would always be my city, and instead, I feel like I don’t know it anymore.”

“I’m sorry, kid. I know that feeling,” Eddie said. “Places matter because of the people in them.” He frowned. “I wasn’t trying to replace Tony Stark, you know.”

“I might have been a little sensitive,” Peter hedged. “I didn’t want any help.” He sighed and smiled at Eddie, a little sheepish. “Even though I probably need it.”

“We have done this superhero thing before,” Eddie told him. “We couldn’t just let you take the streets on your own, even if you really hadn’t needed us.”

 **We were trying to retire,** Venom reminded him, irony thick in his voice.

“That was never going to happen,” Eddie told them, huffing a laugh. “We were patrolling within the first month.”

“Are you talking to them?” Peter asked. “You talk to yourself a lot. I thought it was a journalist thing.”

“Venom is always with me,” Eddie said. “They can hear me thinking, but talking is easier—humans don’t think linearly enough for a conversation inside their own heads. Or, at least, I don’t.”

“So you were both there during class? And both there during our fights?” Eddie nodded. “Can I talk to Venom?”

“You are talking to him.”

“He has a different personality than you do,” Peter argued. “You’re in the same body, but you’re not the same.”

After a quick internal conversation, Venom’s head manifested over Eddie’s shoulder, connected to his skin with a few thick, ropy threads. “ **Hello, Spider-Man** ,” Venom said.

“Hey, Venom. Look, when I realized how badly I’d messed up leaving earlier, I also realized that I’ve been unfair to you guys,” Peter said. “You’ve been helping me for months, and I’ve just been telling you to go away. I, uh, needed the save last night, and I’m glad you were there. And I appreciate you not eating Scorpion, even though I couldn’t have stopped you.”

“You don’t have to apologize. You didn’t know us,” Eddie said. Geez, this kid could give some earnest apologies.

“ **Apology accepted** ,” Venom said, nudging Eddie with a tendril.

“I’m not going to quit being Spider-Man. I couldn’t,” Peter said. “But if you want to work together, I’d, uh, appreciate the help. School has kind of been kicking my butt, and I don’t have time to keep my grades up. And you’ve seen me fall asleep in your class—it’s worse with the boring teachers.”

“We can help.”

“Maybe we can work out a patrol schedule!”

It would certainly work better than Spider-Man running on empty and Venom chasing after him every night, though Eddie had never followed anyone else’s schedule before. He had always gone out as Venom when he wanted, rather than as part of a team. Was this how the Avengers had started? “That will be more help than I ever had in San Francisco,” Eddie said.

Peter nodded enthusiastically. “We can make a Google Doc.”

“No,” Eddie said. “No way. This job already has me on six different websites I have to remember to check. You can just text me. And you can let me know if there are any nights you unexpectedly need help. We move fast.”

“Thanks, prof.”

“You _have_ to call me Eddie now, kid.”

“Mr. Brock? Mr. Venom?”

“ **I like that**.”

“You know what? Stick to prof.”

“Hey, prof, can we order pizza? Healing makes me so hungry.”

Eddie shrugged. “Sure. Sit tight. I’ll order a few pies. You good with meat lovers? Venom needs meat.”

“ **Cooked and dead** ,” Venom grumbled, making a disgusted face back over Eddie’s shoulder at Peter as Eddie went to grab his phone from its charger.

“Meat is good with me,” Peter said. “Do they make, like, carpaccio pizza? For Venom?”

“I fucking wish,” Eddie said, grinning to himself as he pulled up the pizza shop’s number.

#

“So, I think I kind of adopted a kid?”

Dan stared at him over Skype, eyebrows shooting up. Considering how the man had been mostly unfazed by all the various alien shit Eddie had made him deal with over the years, the reaction was surprising.

“Tell me he’s kidding,” Anne said, coming onto the screen with Janet in her arms. “Eddie, you better not have adopted a kid without telling us! After you were at the hospital with us for Janet, you can’t just go to New York and do something like that on your own!”

“Not a real kid,” Eddie said, holding up his hands. The laptop was propped on a piled of textbooks on his kitchen table so he could look at the camera on eye-level. “One of my students. He already has a real guardian. She’s a nice lady.”

“So, a mentee,” Dan said.

Of course Dan was used to having kids latch onto him. He must have had residents following him around like ducklings since he’d become a doctor. Eddie understood the impulse—Dan had a calm, positive energy that attracted everyone to him.

“I think that’s part of being a teacher, hon,” Anne said. “I’m glad. The kids deserve someone like you.”

Eddie laughed. “I’m worried I’m going to be the worst thing that’s ever happened to this kid. I’m not really a good role model.”

“Yes, you are,” Anne snapped. Her hair was disheveled from Janet tugging at it, but her eyes were as sharp as ever. “You’re smart, you’re successful, you’re a literal superhero—”

“Vigilante,” Eddie corrected, though that was what the _Daily Bugle_ was calling Peter too.

Anne ignored him. “You’re good with kids, you’re in a committed relationship—”

“With an alien who shares my body.”

“ **Eddie** ,” Venom scolded, manifesting at his shoulder. Eddie sighed and opened his hand so Venom could twine around it. “ **Hello, Dan. Anne. Jan**.”

Anne blinked and looked down at the baby in her arms. “Did we really set up a rhyming scheme with our names?”

“You’re a good role model, Eddie,” Dan insisted, leaning forward. The tips of his ears were slightly pink. “The kid is making the right choice with you. Just be yourself.”

“Dan, did you realize that all our names rhymed when you thought of Janet?” Anne insisted.

“Um,” Dan said. “I thought it was cute?”

Eddie leaned back in his chair, laughing (quietly) as bickering erupted on the other end of the Skype call. Both Anne and Dan kept their voices pleasant in deference to the baby, so the result was like a Sesame Street segment.

“ **We are good for him** ,” Venom murmured. “ **You do not always need to be so afraid. The humans in your life are lucky to know you. As am I.** ”

“Thanks, love,” Eddie said softly. “You, too.”

#

“Hey, Venom!” Spider-Man greeted as he swung down onto the docks by the Governor’s Island ferry. This late, the large boat was sitting still and dark ahead of them, and the streets on the south end of the island were lit only by streetlights.

“ **Spider-Man** ,” Venom greeted, bashing a man’s face against one of the streetlamps and then throwing him into the water. There was a splash, and then the sound of panicked flailing. The December water would be freezing for a human.

“What have we got?” Peter asked.

“ **They were breaking into the office building in New York Plaza. With guns** ,” Venom said. “ **We stopped them**.”

“Property damage?”

“ **…Some. Did you finish the essay?** ” Peter had swung into the window of their apartment yesterday evening to order from the Chinese restaurant whose delivery range ended just before his dorm, and he had spent nearly the entire time complaining about the essay he’d been assigned by Professor Kinsley in lieu of the usual classroom final. Eddie had encouraged him to ask her for an extension, which she had agreed to, but he had a hard deadline of midnight that night.

“Of course! I’m officially done with the semester! I think I aced it this time. Thanks for walking me through _Lear_.”

“ **Ah, _Lear_** ,” Venom said. Over the years, he had grown to understand Eddie’s love for the classics—especially the ones as bloody as Shakespeare’s _King Lear_. Venom lifted another of the thieves, knocking a blade from his hand and snarling into his face. “’ **Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood**.’” In Venom’s snarl, the line was vicious.

“’This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen!’” Spider-Man quoted, far too cheerfully considering the fact the night air was misting with every breath anyone on the dock exhaled.

Together, they dispatched the criminals quickly. They’d learned to work around each other, Peter’s nimble speed balancing Venom’s brute strength. With Peter’s webs, they could secure their enemies without needing to kill them, which Eddie and Venom had adjusted to over time.

Peter landed lightly on Venom’s shoulder as he wrapped up the last bad guy when he crawled, panting and shivering, out of the bay. “And done! That wasn’t too bad.”

“ **Barbeque?** ” Venom suggested. They had found a Korean barbeque shop nearby that didn’t look too closely when Eddie ate the meat without grilling it first.

“The night is still young!” Peter said, flipping from his shoulder onto the street.

“ **We must celebrate the end of your semester** ,” Venom said. Yours, since Eddie still had stacks of papers to grade. “ **The night will wait for an hour.** ”

“You think?” Peter asked, but his masked face seemed hopeful.

Venom nodded. “ **Yes.** ”

“All right, then!” Peter shot a web toward a nearby building and launched upward, his slender body silhouetted against the neon-stained Manhattan sky. “Let’s go!”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](http://starknjarvis27.tumblr.com/)!


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